New Delhi : Doctors at AIIMS have successfully removed an iron rod that pierced a 35-year-old labourer’s stomach and came out of his back while he was unloading goods from a truck in Noida. Doctors said the patient was recovering well after the surgery and was likely to be discharged next week.
The labourer was impaled by the iron rod on Friday morning. He was pulling goods out of the truck with the rod when it pierced him accidentally. Doctors said two heavy objects fell on the rod, whose sharp end pierced his stomach on impact.
Other labourers at the spot were shocked when they saw that the rod had emerged out of his back. The labourers recalled he was conscious but in “unbearable pain”. “We thought he was dead because his eyes were open and blank. Then he started screaming at us and asked us to take him to hospital,” one of his friends said.
Dr Subodh Kumar, additional professor of surgery at AIIMS trauma centre where the man was brought and operated on Friday evening, said, “He was rushed to a private hospital in Noida immediately by fellow labourers. Luckily, nobody tried to dislodge the rod… neither his friends nor the doctors at the hospital which is usually the tendency that could have been fatal for the patient. As it turned out, the rod had not damaged any vital organs but was lodged in a way that it was blocking the blood from pouring out, which could have been life-threatening.”
Doctors at the Noida hospital referred the patient to AIIMS trauma centre. He reached the hospital around 4.30 pm on Friday, his friends holding the rod at the front and back to keep it steady. “The patient was conscious during the journey and even in hospital, he described the accident clearly. He was in a lot of pain and was worried if taking out the rod could be more dangerous,” Dr Kumar said.
Doctors, who operated on him, had a tough time giving him anaesthesia. “Since the rod had pierced his body, he could not lie down so we had to position him laterally, making him lie on the left side of his body and then gave him anesthesia in that position,” Dr Kumar said.
“The way the rod pierced his body, it could have damaged any critical organ. But he was lucky that it entered his body and came out almost diagonally,” he said.
Doctors said in such high-impact, sharp trauma cases where an external object gets lodged in the body after piercing it, it is better to not try to remove the object without proper facilities. “In this case, we could save him because he came in that position with nobody trying to disturb the rod. Any nudge or pull even in a hospital without proper facilities and it would have moved. That could continued…
